Principles of Economics, Book 2: Some Fundamental Notions

Alfred Marshall, who lived from 1842 to 1924, was an English economist and a professor at Cambridge. His Principles of Economics, published in 1890 after about a decade of work, dominated the teaching of the subject for a generation or more. The edition recorded here dates from 1920, the date of a later printing.

The Principles is a work of business and economics, designed to place the subject on a systematic footing. Its second book, called Some Fundamental Notions, is mainly concerned with definitions. It asks what should be counted as wealth, how production and consumption relate to one another, how labour and the necessaries of life should be understood, and it comments on the ways in which earlier writers had used these terms.

Book 2 comes between the preliminary survey of Book 1 and the study of wants in Book 3, and its four parts are short, which makes it easy to take in one at a time. It is a textbook, not a narrative, and it asks for some patience. Its tone is measured and its arguments are built step by step. Still, the clarity of Marshall’s prose is one reason the work lasted so long, and the discussion of key terms is useful for anyone who wants to understand how economists think.

The recording has four parts, titled Introductory, Wealth, Production, Consumption, Labour, Necessaries, and Income, Capital, and is read by four LibriVox volunteers over about an hour and twenty minutes. Today it is worth hearing for the history of ideas and as a gentle introduction to the foundations of economic reasoning.